Getting Bossy with God: Elizabeth Gilbert references in her book entitled Eat, Pray, Love this idea of petitioning God for what we want. Earlier this year, I made a very deliberate request to have certain things happen to me in order for me to be the best that I could be for myself and everyone around me. It felt a bit like bargaining with God and saying, “Look God, I have been waiting for a long time to find, accomplish or experience certain things in my life, and I am determined to make this happen. Your help is required, and I hope that you will ‘step up’ and help make it happen. If you do, I can fulfill my dreams and be in a place of greater abundance to help others as well”. It was not a typical experience to negotiate with God as a conservative Protestant who was always a little bit shy to ask the universe for anything knowing that I am better off than most people around the world.

However, I had been waiting 49 years for one very important thing in my life–a relationship with someone special–a champion. I wanted a relationship in this new and wonderful place where I had dared to start a new life on Vancouver Island. People were starting to worry about me being alone, saying things like, “There is no perfect person out there, and you might have to lower your standards.” I always shook my head and responded quite confidently, and convincingly (even to myself) that I knew what I was looking for. I would find it, and when I met him, I would know it.

One of my friends asked me, “What if you had to wait until your next life time to meet someone? What if you are not intended to meet this person now or any time soon?” I replied pretty definitively, “No, I am not prepared to wait on this one, nor die in order to experience another lifetime to do so. I am going to get bossy with God and say exactly what I want, and when I want it.” The deal that I had made explicitly with God was this: Meeting someone special to share a life with would need to happen before I turned 50 years old. This relationship would need to be a good fit, and so much so that I would feel very “wowwed” by this person. The “wow” factor was something very important to me.

She continued to debate the matter, “You don’t need to have someone in your life. When you are ready to really love yourself, you will not need anyone else, or you will attract someone to you who loves you just for you.” Of course she is correct. This is absolutely the case. I have spent many years learning how to love and respect myself on many levels and for many personal and professional outcomes, not just finding a partner. However, I felt ready. In fact, I was liking myself so much that I was starting to choose my own company instead of going out with people on dates on the off-chance that they didn’t have crazy deal-breaking habits that I could not overlook (smoking dope, lying, being married, being a workaholic, posting naked pictures online, cheating, anger management issues, addictions, etc.)

And then one day…just when I was pretty close to closing down my online dating site (as it always seemed a bit more like viewing America-Canada’s Most Wanted than a perfect life mate), I got a message. He commented on my profile picture that happened to be a picture of me in the exact same setting as his profile picture on the top of Mt. Maxwell on Saltspring Island. We were posed similarly, and had the same gorgeous Gulf Island view behind us. I was in a practical mode of thinking at that point, to meet over coffee. My observation in the cyber dating world was that there is a serious “failure to launch in the real world” phenomenon of emailing and texting, and I was not interested in this type of protracted dating process with little outcome. Given some recent dating encounters that I had experienced since I had moved here, a couple of which had gotten my hopes up about, I did not want to invest too much energy and hope into something until I investigated the situation first hand.

We efficiently negotiated our early morning meeting time and place like a business deal in a quick phone call. It felt like a business transaction. You can tell a lot about someone by their ability to engage in a phone call. He was polite, responded to my questions, and asked me a bit about myself. I had been used to phone conversations where I either had to carry the entire interaction, or had to sit listening in a zoned out state of utter disengagement. Instead, this gentleman had phone call etiquette figured out, and I liked him immediately. I reminded him that I would prefer to meet him in person instead of walking in the woods alone with a stranger, which was his original suggestion. I joked that I might be an axe murderer, and it might be in his best interests to meet me in a public place. He agreed. We met for breakfast in downtown Courtenay.

At First Glance: It did not take long for me to know that I would love this man. Not only did we like the same food, but we loved to hike. We quickly decided to go on a walk by the ocean, and I noticed that we were literally tripping over ourselves to talk about what we liked to do; and the types of experiences we hoped to have in our lives. We did not talk about our personal lives (families, ex’s or anything really intimate). It was an immense relief not to be interrogated by someone about personal matters that I preferred left to a later time.

The topic of travelling quickly identified itself as a priority to us. I had done more than him, but he was keen about it. He had lived a few places around the world because his father had been in the military, and liked being centered in a home base on the island. I had lived in one solitary city all of my life, and had travelled to escape the monotony of living in one city for my whole life. However, we both agreed that as we approached turning 50 (although he was quick to remind me that he was 10 months behind me from doing so) that we had to start putting some other priorities ahead of work and family. It was quickly apparent that we were the responsible types, used to taking care of other people–the stable, yet predictable backbone of society that had the potential of propping up others instead of ourselves.

At one point on my dating site, I had simply asked, “Who is interested in travelling the world?” I had a couple of responses, but none that were very serious about the idea. Most men wanted to travel the world (and never had), and those who had travelled the world were somewhere else in the world at this time living a nomadic experience far beyond my reach. This fellow seemed tenuous about life changes, but keen to reconsider a life plan where he was presently working in Fort McMurray to frugally save and help support his family. I presented to him early on in our walk, the fact that at some point soon, I intended to quit work and travel the world. He did not baulk at my candid admission which I usually used to scare men who lacked any sense of wonder and adventure, away. However, in his own even-tempered way, he considered my question, and he seemed interested.

See You Around Sometime: However, just when I though the date had gone well, he dropped me off at the car, and left me with the words, “I had a great time. Give me a call if you would like to do something outdoors. I hope to see you around sometime.” I smiled, and thought to myself, “Like hell…” I have never been interested in passive men lacking initiative, and especially a man who would choose to leave me to ask him out on a second date after one that I felt had gone very well. I smiled and said, “See you around sometime,” and walked away. As I drove home, I thought to myself glibly, “Well, you win some and you lose some.”

The next day I got a text. He invited me out for a date for dinner. A text, I pondered, was not the best way to be asked anyone out, especially me, but it was a start. I contemplated the demise of our social norms as texting in sound-bytes in incomplete sentences and poor spelling or grammar was quickly becoming the new social reality. I had grown up in a face-to-face age. However, I decided that I would meet him again because I had enjoyed our first date.

Oh, by the way…: Somewhere between a walk on Goose Spit in the Comox Harbour and our date for dinner at the Atlas Cafe, I knew that something magical was happening to us. We talked about very innocuous things–in fact, we talked a lot about nothing at all. We spent most of our evening talking about places we had been and food that we liked to cook. I liked the simplicity of the encounter, and his good humor in response to most topics. He was witty, and made me feel interesting. The conversation was easy, and it was pretty apparent that we shared some similarities that we marveled at each time something came up that we had in common exclaiming, “Me too!” numerous times throughout the evening. It was obvious that we had good connection.

He drove me home, and kept his hands nervously on the steering wheel as we said our good nights. I asked for a hug, and we awkwardly exchanged ones in the confines of his sports car. He mentioned just as I was leaving, “Oh, by the way, I will be away for three weeks with work.” Long distance was not something that I had met with success in my life. In fact, no one I knew had ever found it very easy. I was alarmed that I had the good fortune of meeting someone so special, but would be yanked away from building this connection any further for almost a month.

Standing on the Edge: I was on an airplane with few movie choices, and I stumbled across a thought-provoking one called A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. It is about these four unsensational, but depressed characters that find themselves up on top of the Topper Tower in London all looking down contemplating the jump. They are embarrassed to be exposed to each other as they find themselves on the same humiliating journey looking down to the ground. After some awkward conversation, they agree to put off their decision to jump for six weeks. They decide that if they still feel the same way on Valentines day, that they will meet and resume the jump. However, predictably in the interim, they find that by knowing that they are no longer alone, and by seeing each other through the mirrors that are vulnerably held in front of them by each other, they find other ways of seeing and then resolving their difficulties.

What I have found in my human journey filled with markedly exciting and successful highs, and some periodic difficulties, is that trouble can insidiously shape us in some pretty unnervingly long term ways if we allow it to happen. Sometimes it takes someone to say, “Hey, actually the problem is not this way, or that way, or that big. You are just seeing it that way.” Each time we have a problem that we delicately avoid, shove under the carpet, or feel that we have successfully averted, we become more adept at avoiding looking life in the eye through fresh and resilient lenses. More often, we spend a lot of solitary time trying to “…to rebuild [ourselves], piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go” (Hornby, 2014). As a result, after each little break in the glass, when we finally stand back and look out of our windows, we have a very distorted view of life out there. Our “cognitive distortions”, ranging from “tunnel vision, all-or-nothing thinking, should and must statements, worse case scenario thinking through to personalization, overgeneralization” (Beck, 1995), and many more disfunctional thought patterns, begin to rule how we conceive of the world around us.

The Trick is to Pretend and Not Let It Happen Again: What we learn as children when we fall down, burn ourselves, or have something painful happen, is that in the future, we steer clear from making the same mistakes again. The whole goal of our human conditioning is to avoid pain at whatever costs. However, as we get older, the maze of “avoiding life’s difficulties” becomes pretty complicated. We get lost in it. We lose other people while we or they are in it. Then, we stay clear of all things because there might be some remote possibility that something awful that we experienced before, might jump out at us when we least expect it. We deny. We blame. We hide. We do not “cope” in the really profound ways that allow us to get back on the horse and keep riding onward. We know when we get triggered by past episodes. Our bodies start to tense. Our breathing gets faster. Our muscles get ready to fight. However, our brains turn off because our blood flow is relegated elsewhere in our state of flight and fear. The majority of the population gets lost in this trigger trauma cycle. No one likes going down these scary rabbit holes, so they are either hyper-vigilent to prevent any problems (doing everything right), or hypo-vigilent to respond to them (numbing out and apathy).

The Mind’s Eye: What has dawned on me lately, as I live on my own and have to grapple with difficulties by myself, is that troubles are only as big as I choose to make them. It took a few recent falls to see that I am going to continually fall as long as I “live”. Now I need to learn how to fall, and not how to avoid falling. I remember learning how to roll and fall on cross country skis. It was something that was expected to happen when we skiied, and as a result, when we fell, we knew how, and didn’t think much of it. The key is to get up and to look at what happened and learn from it. However, it is very important to not take on crazy reactive behaviour because we take what happened to us too personally and own more of the responsibility than is ours to own.

What I am discovering about my own life is that my circle of influence is pretty small. There is really very little that I can truly control in my life other than how I think about my experiences. I can make some choices within the context of my home, my work, my society, my culture and the world; however, there is a randomness in the universe each and every day that I live out loud. There is always going to be some asshole who is going to say his or her rude comments and be obstinate just because I have an idea that is new or different, or that he or she did not think about first. There will always be some obstacle standing in the way of some outcome (not all) that I am trying to achieve. There will always be some cost-benefit analysis that I will have to do to make my straight lines to happiness a bit loopier than I want them to be.

The key for me lately is to stand my ground: What do I need? What can I leave? What matters? What does not matter? I need to be clear about these fundamental questions in the moment of each experience that I live so that if I am triggered, I can breathe and say, “I don’t need to address this right now or ever!” That is a choice I can make each and every time I feel my defences kicking in, and I experience what I perceive to be trouble coming my way.

Trouble in Partnership: What I am also learning lately as I date and discover with whom I am interested in being in partnership, is that people do not have to be similar in many ways, and sometimes not even all that perfectly compatible except in one way: Do we know how to solve problems together? If people can agree on how to see and solve trouble together, we have a better shot at a relationship than all of the fairy tales stories we grew up believing would be our romantic outcomes.

The difficulty is that there are not many problem solvers who want to sit in the eye of the storm either independently or interdependently and “take it on”. We are in a wounded world of avoiders, defenders, and fair weather seekers. It is not easy to find that special someone who is well-versed in the matters of handling difficulties with a level head and heart. Many of us look, connect, sense a little trouble, and move onward. In established relationships, some are healthy teams of trouble shooters, but many marriages are filled with land mines and danger zones that are delicately side-stepped to stay “happy” together.

Stay Awake: I encourage all of us to really look at all of the things that scare us–the people, places, things, experiences, memories, and ideas. Sometimes they are hard to conjure up as we have become desensitized. Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know until someone points it out to us. However, when we are ready, it helps to get raw and vulnerable and find out what frightens us, why it hurts us, and then start examining how to address it each and every time it happens… because it will happen over and over again until the day we die. It means responding, and notreacting. As well, when we are awake to it, we can stop asking everyone around us to walk on eggshells to avoid hurting us, and start getting a bit stronger about dealing with what real life experiences have the potential of giving us both good and bad. It puts us in charge of our own life experiences and what we believe about it.

Let’s stand away from the edge so that we don’t feel as if we are on this dangerous precipice each and every time trouble arises with the fear of falling over. Better yet, let’s make sure that there never comes a time that we feel the need to jump off.

“The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not” (Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life).

Standing on the Edge: I was on an airplane with few movie choices, and I stumbled across a thought-provoking one called A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. It is about these four unsensational, but depressed characters that find themselves up on top of the Topper Tower in London all looking down contemplating the jump. They are embarrassed to be exposed to each other as they find themselves on the same humiliating journey looking down to the ground. After some awkward conversation, they agree to put off their decision to jump for six weeks. They decide that if they still feel the same way on Valentines day, that they will meet and resume the jump. However, predictably in the interim, they find that by knowing that they are no longer alone, and by seeing each other through the mirrors that are vulnerably held in front of them by each other, they find other ways of seeing and then resolving their difficulties.

What I have found in my human journey filled with markedly exciting and successful highs, and some periodic difficulties, is that trouble can insidiously shape us in some pretty unnervingly long term ways if we allow it to happen. Sometimes it takes someone to say, “Hey, actually the problem is not this way, or that way, or that big. You are just seeing it that way.” Each time we have a problem that we delicately avoid, shove under the carpet, or feel that we have successfully averted, we become more adept at avoiding looking life in the eye through fresh and resilient lenses. More often, we spend a lot of solitary time trying to “…to rebuild [ourselves], piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go” (Hornby, 2014). As a result, after each little break in the glass, when we finally stand back and look out of our windows, we have a very distorted view of life out there. Our “cognitive distortions”, ranging from “tunnel vision, all-or-nothing thinking, should and must statements, worse case scenario thinking through to personalization, overgeneralization” (Beck, 1995), and many more disfunctional thought patterns, begin to rule how we conceive of the world around us.

The Trick is to Pretend and Not Let It Happen Again: What we learn as children when we fall down, burn ourselves, or have something painful happen, is that in the future, we steer clear from making the same mistakes again. The whole goal of our human conditioning is to avoid pain at whatever costs. However, as we get older, the maze of “avoiding life’s difficulties” becomes pretty complicated. We get lost in it. We lose other people while we or they are in it. Then, we stay clear of all things because there might be some remote possibility that something awful that we experienced before, might jump out at us when we least expect it. We deny. We blame. We hide. We do not “cope” in the really profound ways that allow us to get back on the horse and keep riding onward. We know when we get triggered by past episodes. Our bodies start to tense. Our breathing gets faster. Our muscles get ready to fight. However, our brains turn off because our blood flow is relegated elsewhere in our state of flight and fear. The majority of the population gets lost in this trigger trauma cycle. No one likes going down these scary rabbit holes, so they are either hyper-vigilent to prevent any problems (doing everything right), or hypo-vigilent to respond to them (numbing out and apathy).

The Mind’s Eye: What has dawned on me lately, as I live on my own and have to grapple with difficulties by myself, is that troubles are only as big as I choose to make them. It took a few recent falls to see that I am going to continually fall as long as I “live”. Now I need to learn how to fall, and not how to avoid falling. I remember learning how to roll and fall on cross country skis. It was something that was expected to happen when we skiied, and as a result, when we fell, we knew how, and didn’t think much of it. The key is to get up and to look at what happened and learn from it. However, it is very important to not take on crazy reactive behaviour because we take what happened to us too personally and own more of the responsibility than is ours to own.

What I am discovering about my own life is that my circle of influence is pretty small. There is really very little that I can truly control in my life other than how I think about my experiences. I can make some choices within the context of my home, my work, my society, my culture and the world; however, there is a randomness in the universe each and every day that I live out loud. There is always going to be some asshole who is going to say his or her rude comments and be obstinate just because I have an idea that is new or different, or that he or she did not think about first. There will always be some obstacle standing in the way of some outcome (not all) that I am trying to achieve. There will always be some cost-benefit analysis that I will have to do to make my straight lines to happiness a bit loopier than I want them to be.

The key for me lately is to stand my ground: What do I need? What can I leave? What matters? What does not matter? I need to be clear about these fundamental questions in the moment of each experience that I live so that if I am triggered, I can breathe and say, “I don’t need to address this right now or ever!” That is a choice I can make each and every time I feel my defences kicking in, and I experience what I perceive to be trouble coming my way.

Trouble in Partnership: What I am also learning lately as I date and discover with whom I am interested in being in partnership, is that people do not have to be similar in many ways, and sometimes not even all that perfectly compatible except in one way: Do we know how to solve problems together? If people can agree on how to see and solve trouble together, we have a better shot at a relationship than all of the fairy tales stories we grew up believing would be our romantic outcomes.

The difficulty is that there are not many problem solvers who want to sit in the eye of the storm either independently or interdependently and “take it on”. We are in a wounded world of avoiders, defenders, and fair weather seekers. It is not easy to find that special someone who is well-versed in the matters of handling difficulties with a level head and heart. Many of us look, connect, sense a little trouble, and move onward. In established relationships, some are healthy teams of trouble shooters, but many marriages are filled with land mines and danger zones that are delicately side-stepped to stay “happy” together.

Stay Awake: I encourage all of us to really look at all of the things that scare us–the people, places, things, experiences, memories, and ideas. Sometimes they are hard to conjure up as we have become desensitized. Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know until someone points it out to us. However, when we are ready, it helps to get raw and vulnerable and find out what frightens us, why it hurts us, and then start examining how to address it each and every time it happens… because it will happen over and over again until the day we die. It means responding, and notreacting. As well, when we are awake to it, we can stop asking everyone around us to walk on eggshells to avoid hurting us, and start getting a bit stronger about dealing with what real life experiences have the potential of giving us both good and bad. It puts us in charge of our own life experiences and what we believe about it.

Let’s stand away from the edge so that we don’t feel as if we are on this dangerous precipice each and every time trouble arises with the fear of falling over. Better yet, let’s make sure that there never comes a time that we feel the need to jump off.

“The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not” (Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life).